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Black Housing, White Finance: African American Housing And Home Ownership In Evanston, Illinois, Before 1940 - Statistical Data Included

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1999 by Andrew Wiese

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Conclusion

In Evanston, African Americans faced rigid segregation in housing, but within the west side, they built a community noted for residential stability, economic mobility, and the opportunity for hard working people to own a home of their own. Three factors combined to facilitate African American home ownership in Evanston. First, the availability of vacant land allowed builders to construct homes to meet the range of incomes in west Evanston. Second, the willingness of African American families themselves to exchange sweat equity for a home, to extend construction over long periods, and to use their homes to generate income, brought home ownership within reach of a broad spectrum of blue collar Evanstonians. Finally, the availability of credit from mainstream institutions and individual lenders made it possible for scores of black families in Evanston to extend their incomes and to purchase or build far mote than they might have without it.

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In contrast to the model of housing market discrimination based on northern central cities and the literature of early African American suburbanization, which emphasizes the role of informal or "cheap" housing markets in facilitating the dream of home ownership, African American home buyers in Evanston had access to credit from sources in the "mainstream" or formal suburban housing market. The market for African American homes in Evanston combined features of both formal and informal markets, and through these means, an appreciable number of African Americans became home owners before World War Two.

Beyond the immediate context of metropolitan Chicago, of course, what makes the Evanston case so compelling are the similarities between Evanston and other commuter suburbs of its era. As historian, Kenneth Jackson, and others have shown, railroad suburbs such as Evanston were routinely home to workingclass, as well as elite, suburbanites. [79] African American service communities were especially common in the New York-Philadelphia metropolitan corridor, which had exceptionally well-developed suburban rail systems at the turn of the century, but they were also common near cities such as St. Louis and Los Angeles, and they were ubiquitous in elite suburbs across the South.

In such suburbs, African American communities were long-standing features in the suburban landscape. Moreover, African Americans typically occupied separate and marginal areas of these suburbs, and race relations reflected similar patterns of inequality to those in Evanston. In a survey of suburban Philadelphia, for example, Leonard Blumberg and Michael Lalli found sixty "little ghettoes," which "are now or were in the recognizable past, areas of marginal location with Respect to residential development at the time they began. Often they were cut off by railroad tracks, swamps, or highways. In one case, a two-block long stone wall was built reputedly to mark 'the line.'" [80] There is also evidence that Aftican American families bought and built new homes in these suburbs, especially in suburbs where they had access to vacant land. In Englewood, New Jersey, and Yonkers, New Yourk, for instance, black suburbanites in the 1920s bought lots and built homes in black subdivisions at the outskirts of town. What's more, Gotham's black newspapers advertised vacant lots or new homes for sale in these and almost a dozen other suburbs during the Great Migration. [81]

Black Housing, White Finance: African American Housing And Home Ownership In Evanston, Illinois, Before 1940 - Statistical Data Included

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1999 by Andrew Wiese

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